Colony Survival is a wildly unrealistic game. Everything is blocky. Colonists don't have mouths and are born as adults from a wood-and-cloth construction. The night only lasts a couple of minutes. It's permanently summer and wheat only requires a couple of days to grow.
But despite all of these simplifications, many parts of the game required quite a lot of real-world knowledge to develop. While working on the graphics, we had to learn how light scatters through the air and reflects from various surfaces. When adding the new ores and metals in 0.4.0, we had to learn about real history and even physics.
The attempts to underlying realism might seem like overkill. I believe it isn't. The following paradox is relevant:
A.) My hands are physically able to draw a photorealistic sketch
B.) My brain knows when a sketch is not photorealistic
C.) Despite A and B, my brain cannot let my hands draw a photorealistic sketch
I often wondered how this is possible, and I think I have a solution. We have got a lot of unconscious knowledge and experience. In the specific case of photorealism: we are looking at the world nearly every waking moment. We know what real life looks like. We've got many years of experience with it. But we don't know why exactly the world looks like it does. While we have years of experience and know it perfectly well unconsciously, we cannot consciously verbalize the reasons why something looks realistic or fake.So while nearly all of us can judge whether a sketch is photorealistic or not, only a few us have the knowledge and skill to draw a photorealistic sketch.
I think the same principle applies to many aspects of developing Colony Survival. To portray a historical colony in a semi-realistic world, we need to understand some historical/biological/geographical principles in quite a lot of detail. The better we understand those principles and represent them in-game, the more immersive Colony Survival will be. When we 'break' those rules, you might not be able to explain precisely what's wrong, but you will feel that something is off.
In the past week, we've been struggling with the principles behind natural variety. Why do deserts and jungles exist? Why are they located where they are located? How does a desert transition to a jungle? How can we apply these principles in-game?
One of the charts we've been looking at a lot is this one:
Most of the chart make sense. Tundras are cold and dry. Deserts are hot and dry. Rainforests are hot and wet.
But to me, some of the info was pretty surprising. It's possible for a desert to receive just as much rainfall as a temperate or boreal forest. I didn't know anything about temperate rainforests.
Another thing that surprised me was the "border" between biomes. Many of them are angled from the bottom left to the top right.
Look at the red line, the border between shrubland and forests. What does it mean exactly? I struggled to put it into words.
Apparently, as the average annual temperature increases from 0°C to 22°C (30°F to 70°F), more rainfall is needed to sustain a forest.
The same can be seen all over the chart. Transitioning to a 'higher' biome requires more rainfall as the temperature increases. And 'higher' biomes are generally biomes with more vegetation. I modified the original chart to represent that a bit better:
At first glance, I thought this was a bit weird. Don't plants and trees 'like' sunlight? Not in extreme amounts, but an average annual temperature of ~10°C doesn't sound high, and in the "low rainfall scenario", there's already significantly less vegetation at that temperature compared to colder climates.
Then we figured out that the problem probably is not the heat directly, but the increased evaporation. As the temperature increases, rainfall disappears quicker, and there's less water available for vegetation to grow.
Here are some "rules" we've tried to distill from the charts above:
1.) More water = more vegetation
2.) Higher temperature = more vegetation
3.) Higher temperature = water disappears quicker (Paradox!!!1!!1!)
4.) Maximum rainfall is way higher in hot climates, meaning that a wider variety of vegetation can appear there (everything from 'none' to 'lots')
Here's what that would look like, from north to south. Average annual temperature:
Below 2°C/36°F: Tundra. It barely rains, but once it rains, the water barely evaporates. It's too cold for trees or lots of bushes, so everything is covered in grass and moss. There are no deserts.
Below 8°C/46°F: Taiga. Rainfall increases. Nearly all of the region is covered in trees. Only the driest of places revert to shrubland/grassland.
Below 22°C/71°F: Temperate. On average, more rainfall. Most of the region is covered in trees. Relatively dry places revert to shrubland or grassland. In the hottest and driest corners of the region, some small deserts exist. In the hottest and wettest parts of the region, there are temperate rainforests.
Above 22°C/71°F: Tropic. The driest ~20% of the tropics is a desert, because the heat makes the water evaporate quickly. As the rainfall increases, vegetation increases from desert to grassland, to shrubland, to woodland, to seasonal forest, to rainforest.
We believe applying these rules in Colony Survival will result in a world that's a lot more realistic and more fun to explore. We're looking forward to showing you our first successful attempts at generating the new world! This week's attempts mostly looked like brown hills, so we've still got some progress to make :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!